What Can We Expect from Pope Francis's Encyclical on the Environment?

As I've written previously, the papacy often acts as a kind of Rorschach test, a screen onto which we project our agendas, our hopes and our fears. To put it simply, when we look at the Pope, we tend to see what we want to see.

Even if this idolatrous tendency is not peculiar to our "media age," it is most certainly exacerbated by the way the media liberally combines an unreflective progressivism (by which I don't mean a melioristic faith, but rather an unthinking preference for the merely new) with wilful incomprehension and historical ignorance.

As a result, theological emphases that were integral to the teachings of Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, are heralded in the mouth of Francis as proof of his "radical" redefinition of the papacy. (One need look no further for a demonstration of Francis's continuity with his predecessors than to consult Sandro Magister's remarkable anthology of papal statements over the last twelve months. On the specific matter of papal teaching on the environment, see Nicole Winfield's helpful summary.)

This tendency has been particularly apparent in the various and wildly varying claims that have been made concerning Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, which will be released on 18 June. So, in preparation, I thought it might be appropriate to look back over some of the articles that we've had the pleasure to publish on ABC Religion &amp; Ethics, written by distinguished theologians and philosophers. These articles explore both the vitality of Catholic humanism after the Second Vatican Council - which doubtless constitutes the immediate backdrop to Laudato Si - and the broader moral debate about the limits of technology and the necessary constraints on human behaviour.

These authors will then be revisiting their arguments once Pope Francis's encyclical has officially been released. In the meantime, these articles represent indispensable reading on the way theological reflection might help us address one of the great moral challenges of our time.

The Sacrament of Creation

Clive Hamilton

Pope Francis has made no secret of his conviction that human-induced climate change, along with other forms of environmental degradation, represents a grave threat to humanity's future. At times he even speaks in quasi-apocalyptic terms: "Let us not allow omens of destruction and death to accompany the advance of this world!"

His forthcoming "ecological encyclical" - expected around the middle of this year - is shaping up as a decisive intervention. We can surmise that he hopes it will help turn the world away from a path of self-destruction.

'Love that Moves the Sun': Catholicism's Deeper Ecology

Mary Taylor

Few people over the centuries have had the confidence, or perhaps the chutzpah, to publicly prognosticate on what a papal encyclical would say. But the ascension of Pope Francis has been accompanied by the rise of an entire industry devoted to ripping his words from their contexts, putting words in his mouth, or applying convoluted hermeneutics to tease out what he "really" means. As a result, speculation about his upcoming ecological encyclical has reached fever pitch.

For my part, I would never presume to speculate on what the pope will say. But I think we can assuredly know something about what he won't say.

A Man for All Seasons: Pope Francis and the Environment

Celia Deane-Drummond

That the first encyclical of Pope Francis will be dedicated to environmental issues represents a remarkable convergence with the renowned green Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I. Catholic conservatives who might be inclined to resist this message have failed to spot the obvious: that creation care is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a Christian - even in a traditional, orthodox sense.

This raises the question: How new is this strand in Catholic social thought? Is this a theological shift or not?

The Cry for Creation

Michael Stafford

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the key scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, reflected on those words from the Bhagavad Gita as he witnessed the detonation of the first atomic bomb during the Trinity test deep in the New Mexican desert in 1945.

In retrospect, Oppenheimer was too hard on himself. In practice, our automobiles, coal-fired power plants and, more broadly, what Pope Francis terms our "throwaway culture" have proven to be more destructive than our arsenals of nuclear weapons. Today, we live under the shadow of a man-made existential threat of global proportions - climate change. But climate change is only one piece of a larger set of ecological, economic and social crises simultaneously facing humanity.